*New Year toasts, from Diogenes to Tennyson to Ogden Nash, blithe & capricious, whimsical & wisecracking, a bit of wordplay here & there, & (maybe) a smattering of sense & sagacity

Toasts for 2007

Stir the eggnog, lift the toddy, Happy New Year, everybody.
--Phyllis McGinley

You wouldn’t know it from the weather, but it is time to toast in the New Year. I devote the final column of each year to toasts, highbrow and lowbrow, and lively, I hope, with folk wisdom, good wishes, sober and not-so-sober thoughts, and most of all, humor.

Toasts are universal, and virtually every language has a toast for health or life. Toasts are vehicles to express your thoughts to family and close friends in a less fraught or emotional way than directly expressing your feelings; at the other end of the spectrum, they allow you to effortlessly communicate with strangers at a party or a bar. The ones I’ve chosen here include traditional toasts, aphorisms and bits of light verse.

Many toasts are related to drinking itself:

There are many good reasons for drinking –
And one has just entered my head:

If a man doesn't drink when he's living,

How the hell can he drink when he's dead?

Friends may come, friends may go,
Friends may peter out, oh you know.
But we’ll be friends through thick and thin
So long as this bar doesn’t run out of gin.
–Traditional English toast

Good wine ruins the purse; bad wine ruins the stomach.
--Spanish saying

Question: What would you drink to?
Answer: About three in the morning.

To temperance, in moderation.

Many toasts relate to human nature:

Here's to men!
They don't kiss and tell,
They kiss and exaggerate

Here’s to hell.
May my stay there be as much fun as my way there.

If you marry for money, you will earn every penny.
--Dr. Phil McGraw

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
--William Blake

You don’t need a weatherman
To know which way the wind blows.
--Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues

Babies haven’t any hair;
Old men’s heads are just as bare;--
Between the cradle and the grave
Lies a haircut and a shave.
--Samuel Hoffenstein

Some toasts are just fun:

I drink to your charm, your beauty and your brains—
Which gives you a rough idea of how hard up I am for a drink.
—Groucho Marx

Bless, oh Lord, these delectable vittles;
May they add to your glory, not to our middles.
Birds do it and fly.
Bees do it and die.
Dogs do it and stick to it,
So here’s to it. Let’s do it!

My favorite of all is the irreplaceable toast I repeat every year in print and out loud wherever I happen to be on New Year’s Eve. It consists of these three lines from a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson:

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring happy bells across the snow;
The year is going, let him go.

And finally, my own toast for the community:

To East Hampton village and East Hampton town,
To Amagansett and Napeague and Montauk, the End,
To Wainscott and Springs and the Northwest Woods,
To Hardscrabble and Georgica and certainly to Devon--
I raise my glass to your happiness in 2007.